Mexico's Green Party: Reform prisons

(Vatican Radio) The official spokesman of Mexico's Green Party is demanding a radical overhaul of the country's penal system, including life imprisonment without parole, for those convicted of kidnapping.

Arturo Escobar says Mexico's prison system is a shambles and those serving sentences must either be put to work or study, because the idle hands alternative is creating a university of crime. Escobar stresses the Mexican people insist on the maximum sentence currently available under the law for kidnappers.

“Why life imprisonment? Because, once again, the community of imprisonment in Mexico, especially the jails, the federal jails, need to make a statement. In our country, jails have become the university of crime. So we need a whole new perspective, from the constitution to the ordinary laws, regarding, the way we treat prisoners, the way we treat our jails, the way we administer our jails. So it is not only life imprisonment it is a whole new concept about the obligation that a criminal has to pay his duty or to pay his debt to society.”

The Greens are in a coalition with the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, which won the recent Presidential Election, so rhetoric will soon be transformed into legislation.